Four out of five of them were living together (supposedly sleeping in a giant bed made of four other beds) in a triangle-shaped loft at the end of 44th Street in Long Island City. Rumor had it that Johnson Reuchtig, Tyler Savage’s blue-chip gallery, would send a bike messenger every weekend with a silver briefcase full of drugs that Pine City consumed in earnest until it was empty. Then JR would deliver an entire shiva buffet from Barney Greengrass, which Pine City would eat before passing out, waking up, and starting the cycle anew. The only one who didn’t sleep in the massive bed—Jack Wells—lived on a thirty-two-foot wooden sailboat docked mere steps away from the loft on the East River, and they would sail it around Manhattan shooting rubber bullets at skyscrapers, taking photographs as the glass walls rippled but did not break.

I was so young then, and very sheltered, not on purpose, not because someone was protecting me, but the opposite. I stood beneath, still, the shadows of impoverished white Southern swamp masculinity—bitter misogynies that stick to every particle of your consciousness, so that you don’t know if it’s possible to be anything other than a failure. You don’t know if the sun will ever come out.

But they were the sun.

Months later, all of the body parts Carey cast that night would be painted in various stages of decay and buried, on public and private property, without permission, through the entirety of New York State, though I didn’t know that at the time. When she returned and set her hand on top of mine, freeing me from the shrinking white dust with a light tap on each finger, someone took her picture. Though I felt the flash on my face, I wondered if I would show up in the image at all.

“Don’t steal my fingerprints,” I said to her—the joke I’d been working on for twenty-four minutes.

Carey looked at me. “I won’t,” she said, after a moment. “Hold on.” She reached into the mold and rubbed them away, erasing the whorls of my fingertips one by one. “There. Now you can be nobody.”

“I’m already nobody.” I lowered my eyes, embarrassed.

She placed one plaster-dusted fingernail under my chin, tipping it up. Her eyes went to my hair and back again.

“No,” she said. “You’re a pearl.” She withdrew her finger.

I blushed. “Thank you.”

“You’re an artist,” she said. A statement, not a question.

“I paint,” I admitted. “Well—I’m at the Academy. I want to be a painter.”

“What are your paintings like? Like—really?”

“They want to be bigger. But we’re not supposed to.”

“You’re exactly like me,” she said. “You try to follow all the rules, but you don’t want to.”

“I guess,” I agreed nervously.